Today is number two in the list.

2) You’re Not Going To Jump Out of a Day Job into a Million Dollar Advance

The days of the big break are pretty much over. Labels don’t sign unproven acts with nothing going on. Labels want a sure thing that already has built it on their own. Oh and labels don’t offer million dollar (or six figure) advances anymore to new acts. If you’re waiting around to be discovered and aren’t taking your career in your own hands, you will be waiting till you’re dead.

This problem I really see a lot. The artist that thinks that it will be a big advance (especially if you sign with a major). It was a long time ago I saw these advances. Then someone always tells you about someone that got a huge offering, but always its something behind it. Like Joel Adams that took his song single handed to 200 million streams on Spotify, yes he got really big upfronts thrown after him. Like it says he had done the bigger part himself.

This is also reflected quite much other stuff that artists think is going on. For example, that bigger artist gets really big sums for playing on festivals, yes Justin Bieber does, but a midsize rock band is not. I get so many artists thinking that a showcase festival should pay them to get there. Duh, it’s showcasing you are showing off products. If you think that companies get paid to put their stuff on fairs think again.

So what happened to the big advances. To explain it during the 80:s in the USA it was easy to write off an advance on the tax money. But not paying so much taxes they instead just signed bands and like a lottery sometimes one of these bands actually took off, still many didn’t.
I don’t know if the rules changed but today this is not the case. Today you have the time to wait until the act is finished and then do the move to grab it. Today it’s more like to be a bidding war around a good band.

Yes, you have to do a lot of stuff yourself. Luckily there are some new companies (Musichelp is one of them) who invest time and resources to develop artist to the level where it becomes interesting. It’s  Do it yourself or try to build the team with experienced people that have large networks. Sometimes these people are called managers. I would change that term a manager is more to like to work with a really established act. These are more to be called developers. It’s really in its infancy but this will be the hot part of the music industry in a couple of years, much like the songwriting teams.

The red part is from an article in Digital music news, here is a link to the whole article.
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/07/27/millennial-musicians/